Revisiting Over-smoothing and Over-squashing Using Ollivier-Ricci CurvatureKhang Nguyen, Hieu Nong, Vinh Nguyen et al.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) had been demonstrated to be inherently susceptible to the problems of over-smoothing and over-squashing. These issues prohibit the ability of GNNs to model complex graph interactions by limiting their effectiveness in taking into account distant information. Our study reveals the key connection between the local graph geometry and the occurrence of both of these issues, thereby providing a unified framework for studying them at a local scale using the Ollivier-Ricci curvature. Specifically, we demonstrate that over-smoothing is linked to positive graph curvature while over-squashing is linked to negative graph curvature. Based on our theory, we propose the Batch Ollivier-Ricci Flow, a novel rewiring algorithm capable of simultaneously addressing both over-smoothing and over-squashing.
VidConv: A modernized 2D ConvNet for Efficient Video RecognitionChuong H. Nguyen, Su Huynh, Vinh Nguyen et al.
Since being introduced in 2020, Vision Transformers (ViT) has been steadily breaking the record for many vision tasks and are often described as ``all-you-need" to replace ConvNet. Despite that, ViTs are generally computational, memory-consuming, and unfriendly for embedded devices. In addition, recent research shows that standard ConvNet if redesigned and trained appropriately can compete favorably with ViT in terms of accuracy and scalability. In this paper, we adopt the modernized structure of ConvNet to design a new backbone for action recognition. Particularly, our main target is to serve for industrial product deployment, such as FPGA boards in which only standard operations are supported. Therefore, our network simply consists of 2D convolutions, without using any 3D convolution, long-range attention plugin, or Transformer blocks. While being trained with much fewer epochs (5x-10x), our backbone surpasses the methods using (2+1)D and 3D convolution, and achieve comparable results with ViT on two benchmark datasets.